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A Quiet Place (Sort of) to Start Anew

BY the time she returned to New York after three years in Washington, Amanda Lee Neville had refined her living criteria.

Something she really wanted — a top floor apartment — was “a total wish-list item,” she said. “That’s one way you can control your environment. You are not going to have somebody above you.”

Ms. Neville, 29, speaks from experience. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1998, she spent five years in an East 75th Street walk-up, starting off in a second-floor one-bedroom. Someone with a heavy footstep lived above her. The vibrating thump with every movement drove her crazy. “This is not something you can really complain about,” Ms. Neville said. “This is a reality of apartment living.”

When her apartment was burglarized, the landlord offered her a one-bedroom on the top floor. Ms. Neville felt it was safer, because a burglar would have more risk of exposure, and she appreciated not having anyone clomping above.

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Amanda Lee Neville, with Minnie, in their new apartmentCredit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Then, the couple downstairs had twin boys. “They took turns crying for the next year and a half,” with the noise reverberating through the airshaft, Ms. Neville said. “I remember the first week, lying in bed — what is that sound? Is that a baby? I had this irrational thought — I thought this was a no-baby building! And then I recovered.”

In 2003, Ms. Neville, who by now was married, moved to Washington, where her husband got a job and she attended law school. A year later, she was divorced. Last winter, she decided to return to New York and with two former colleagues to start a branding agency called Thinkso Creative (thinksocreative.com). “I had this freak-out where I had to find an apartment in, like, a week because I wouldn’t have time after that,” she said. She hit the Web site Craigslist, searching for a one- or two-bedroom rental for $1,800 or less. She wanted enough space for a home office and her furniture, which included an enormous rectangular dining table where she and her friends gathered. It seats 10.

She resolved to take only public transportation during her hunt. “That’s part of figuring out where to live, doing the train thing,” she said. “I refused to take cabs my whole hunt, but I was tempted.”

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Settling on a one-bedroom above a bar in Park Slope, BrooklynCredit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

When she visited New York, she stayed with friends in different neighborhoods — Midtown and Inwood; Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene, Brooklyn; and Rego Park, Queens — so she knew she would be happy living anywhere, as long as she had a decent subway commute to Manhattan. Still, her budget narrowed her options, as did her need for a dog-friendly building. Minnie the Maltese “barks occasionally, so I wasn’t interested in trying to hide her,” she said.

She found possibilities in outlying neighborhoods. East Harlem was first. She visited a large one-bedroom in a lovely new building on East 112th Street, and negotiated the rent to $1,800 from $1,875. However, it was early evening, and the street was already deserted.

She took along her good friend and business partner, Elizabeth Amorose, for a second opinion.

Afterward, they asked a police officer on the subway platform about the neighborhood. If his girlfriend were considering the building, what would he tell her? “He went off on all these crime statistics,” Ms. Neville said. That was it for East Harlem.

A broker showed her two places in an East 84th Street building. “Both were absolute dreck,” she said, with low ceilings and brick-wall views.

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A top-floor duplex near Columbia UniversityCredit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

She refused to live in darkness. At Georgetown, she had a basement apartment, “which had a formative effect on me,” she said. “It was so dark and depressing, very bad for the psyche.”

The broker was so aggressive that Ms. Neville felt intimidated. “You are seeing so many places and a lot are disappointing, so you start to question whether you are unreasonable,” she said.

On Amsterdam Avenue near 104th Street, she checked out a $2,300 two-bedroom, thinking she might get a roommate. The apartment was a duplex, and she was glad to hear it occupied the top floors. But it had a tiny spiral staircase, and she would never be able to fit her furniture. To her surprise, she was finding that top floors weren’t too scarce. (Nor were ground floors.)

Brooklyn appealed to her. Ms. Amorose lived in Fort Greene, in a house her husband had bought years before. In nearby Park Slope, Ms. Neville saw the first suitable place: the top floor of a small building, with a big kitchen and living room, for $1,800. She asked the superintendent if he had other places that weren’t available so soon, because she still had business to wrap up in Washington. He did. He had the top floor of the apartment right next door, which needed some repairs before it was ready to rent.

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A one-bedroom in Harlem, but with empty streets at nightCredit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The apartment, up two steep flights, was nearly identical to the other, but the tiny bathroom was in terrible shape, with so many missing tiles “you wouldn’t want to be barefoot,” Ms. Neville said. It wasn’t on the repair list.

She returned with Ms. Amorose, who said, “I really wanted her to live near me, so if she was undecided I wanted to be there to encourage her to take it.”

Both preferred the second apartment, which lacked a partition dividing the kitchen and living room, so it was flooded with light. Ms. Neville negotiated. The landlord was paying for repairs anyway, so why not include the bathroom?

While awaiting word, she continued hunting. “After I saw the place I wanted, I had a standard, and was looking for something better,” she said. Though she saw another well-located Park Slope place for just $1,450, it was dark and small.

The landlord agreed to redo the bathroom. Ms. Neville read the lease carefully and made some changes, like crossing out the standard no-pet clause. She signed a one-year lease. She turned a small room off the bedroom into a combination office and closet. She likes having a tree outside her bedroom window so she can track the changing seasons. Her rent is lower than when she left the Upper East Side. (That was $1,950.)

“I really lucked out,” she said. “It has everything I want, and it is on the top floor.”

There’s no thumping from above. There is, however, noise from below, though she finds that more tolerable. “In an ironic twist, my apartment is not that quiet,” she said. “There’s a bar downstairs.”

E-mail: thehunt@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page RE6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quiet Place (Sort of) to Start Anew. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe